Aaron MacLean – Washington Free Beaconhttp://freebeacon.com
Sat, 17 Feb 2018 10:00:57 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.2At Mar-a-Lago, Focus on North Koreahttp://freebeacon.com/blog/mar-lago-focus-north-korea/
Tue, 04 Apr 2017 18:14:12 +0000http://freebeacon.com/?post_type=blog&p=750895The Trump administration is dealing with a lot. Just consider the agenda this week: a nuclear war for its Supreme Court nominee on Capitol Hill, dueling investigations and political fights over contacts with Russia and the previous administration's handling of intelligence, a renewed push on health care, a visit of the President of Egypt and the King of Jordan to discuss peace in the Middle East, and of course the two-day visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Mar-a-Lago.

]]>The Trump administration is dealing with a lot. Just consider the agenda this week: a nuclear war for its Supreme Court nominee on Capitol Hill, dueling investigations and political fights over contacts with Russia and the previous administration's handling of intelligence, a renewed push on health care, a visit of the President of Egypt and the King of Jordan to discuss peace in the Middle East, and of course the two-day visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Mar-a-Lago.

Each of these matters is, to state the obvious, complex.

Any full survey of the China relationship, to take an issue in isolation, ought to include discussions of militarization and freedom of navigation in the East and South China Seas, currency manipulation, trade imbalances, economic bullying of American allies in the Pacific, and a number of other things besides.

A team can only be expected to do so much well. For that reason alone, the agenda with the Chinese delegation on Thursday and Friday, over some socializing and the all-you-can-eat roast beef buffet, should be North Korea, North Korea, and North Korea.

Kim Jong Un's reckless effort to pair nuclear warheads with missiles that can range the United States will, if successful, fundamentally upset the strategic balance in the region. It must be stopped. Short of pre-emptive action taken by the United States and its ally South Korea—an option about which no one is excited, but which must be considered—the only player with the leverage to make Pyongyang change its behavior is China. But China's limited efforts to employ this leverage have tended towards show over substance, as with the recent announcement that Beijing was curtailing coal imports from North Korea—even though it may have already come so close to the legal limit of such imports under existing U.N. sanctions that it was going to have to cut off such imports anyway.

This is an issue that must be confronted—and all the better if such a discussion happens in person between Xi and Trump in the pleasing atmosphere of Palm Beach. It should not be tied to other issues, or to any bargains, "grand" or otherwise, about the U.S. presence in Japan and South Korea. American forces are in the region to aid in the defense of allies against the clear-and-present danger of the Kim regime, and to guarantee the peace and security of the region. It is in China's interest to prevent a conflict on its border sparked by the irresponsibility of the Kim family. No U.S. "concessions" need even be discussed.

Xi's negotiators will come armed with a long list of requests, and likely a handful of concessions of their own. They will surely recognize the unusual character of the current strategic moment for the United States and China: on trade, America wants to change the status quo, but on security, it is in the U.S. interest to hold firm. Looking to establish hegemony in the western Pacific, the Chinese negotiators may well seek meaningful and difficult-to-reverse security concessions (the removal of the THAAD missile defense system from the Korean peninsula, or a reduction in U.S. support for Taiwan) in return for squishy and reversible economic incentives (alterations in Chinese trade policy or direct Chinese investment that could generate jobs in the United States—for as long as the policy continues, anyway). They may throw in some limited economic pressure on North Korea to sweeten the deal—something else that is easily reversed.

This would be an extremely perilous road for the United States to wander down, and if trade is going to be discussed, as seems certain, that conversation would be better off occurring in isolation from security talks. There are plenty of possible missteps and policy dangers packed into each issue on its own. Even Chinese requests that may seem modest and benign—like, say, a request for a joint statement that endorses Beijing's One Belt, One Road trade and infrastructure push—may be anything but. One Belt, One Road is widely perceived in the region as an effort for Beijing to acquire even more decisive economic leverage over its neighbors, so much so that Australia has recently been distancing itself from the initiative. A presidential endorsement would be taken as a sign of American withdrawal from the region.

Why are China's neighbors worried about its economic leverage? Because when it has such leverage, it weaponizes it—except, perversely, in the case of North Korea. Upset with South Korea's acceptance of THAAD—a wholly legitimate act of a sovereign state to defend itself from an existential threat—Beijing has relentlessly punished the South Korean economy. Permits for tourism to South Korea have been radically restricted. The Chinese ventures of a major South Korean conglomerate that is providing land for the THAAD deployment have been targeted for retaliation. Planned new routes for charter flights have been rejected by Beijing. Korean cultural exports like movies and music—big business for South Korea—have been curtailed in a variety of ways.

The situation is so bad that Seoul is not ruling out leveling a complaint against China at the World Trade Organization. Alas, such behavior is normal for Xi's regime. Upset with the election of an independence-friendly party in Taiwan last year, Beijing has executed a very similar campaign of economic retaliation.

Mind you, these issues are only a small sliver of what is going on, and only in Northeast Asia. All around the rim of the Asia Pacific and into the Indian Ocean, China is engaged in aggressive and unacceptable behavior. Each issue will have to be managed and confronted in turn, and over time. The Chinese would like nothing better that to disadvantage the United States by securing some sort of deal at Mar-a-Lago that links economic and security issues and makes the current administration politically invested in Chinese trade concessions that could easily be reversed—and that would likely be more glitter than gold.

]]>What the Jim Webb Debacle in Annapolis Is Teaching the Militaryhttp://freebeacon.com/blog/what-the-jim-webb-debacle-in-annapolis-is-teaching-the-military/
Wed, 29 Mar 2017 16:26:26 +0000http://freebeacon.com/?post_type=blog&p=747928Imagine you are a young midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy processing the news that Jim Webb—Annapolis class of '68, recipient of the Navy Cross, former senator and secretary of the Navy, former member of the Annapolis faculty, bestselling novelist and journalist—has been forced by political pressure to decline an award for distinguished alumni at your school this week.

]]>Imagine you are a young midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy processing the news that Jim Webb—Annapolis class of '68, recipient of the Navy Cross, former senator and secretary of the Navy, former member of the Annapolis faculty, bestselling novelist and acclaimed journalist—has been forced by political pressure to decline an award for distinguished alumni at your school this week.

The most widely cited reason for his political toxicity is an article he wrote in 1979 (side note: almost forty years ago!) in Washingtonian Magazine entitled "Women Can't Fight." Never mind that he has apologized for both the vivid language of his youth and the ways in which the article made life difficult for women already in the service. ("Clearly, if I had been a more mature individual, there are things that I would not have said in that magazine article. To the extent that this article subjected women at the Academy or the armed forces to undue hardship, I remain profoundly sorry.") Never mind the fact that Webb was channeling the beliefs of the vast majority of his fellow infantrymen, if in somewhat impolitic language—or that even today, the vast majority of Marines of all grades oppose the inclusion of women in combat units. Never mind that in 1987, as secretary of the Navy, Webb opened a tremendous number of new positions in the service to women. Most of all, never mind that as of December 2015, combat units were all opened to women by order of then-Secretary of Defense Carter, overriding the objections of the Marine Corps (though not of the Army).

In other words, the proponents of including women in combat units have won. But, as the case of Webb shows, that's not enough. You have to salt the fields.

Returning to our midshipman, here is what the Naval Academy has taught you this week:

Do not take a bold stand, especially in public. It does not matter if your argument is made honestly and in good faith, or if you are an expert on the matter of policy under discussion.

Keep a keen sense of which way the political wind is blowing. Don't fight it—drift with it.

No matter the number of your accomplishments or their objective prestige, you will be humiliated for once having promoted a Wrong Opinion.

The more effectively and memorably you promoted the Wrong Opinion, the greater your punishment will be.

From the perspective of the left, of course, Webb's punishment is richly deserved, in part because of claims that his words contributed to an unsafe environment for females in the military at the time. The tactics used to force him to withdraw this week also have the familiar flavor of left-wing activism to them. In a statement last night, Webb noted that "those protesting my receipt of this award now threaten to disrupt the ceremonies surrounding its issuance." At the U.S. Naval Academy, just as at Middlebury College, a heckler's veto is apparently possible—though it is hard to imagine midshipmen themselves doing the protesting.

Just as interesting is how Webb describes the manner in which pressure was applied. He was told "that my presence at the ceremony would likely mar the otherwise celebratory nature of that special day" in "conversations with the Alumni Association, including information passed down from top Navy leadership in the Pentagon…"

A nation gets the military leadership it deserves. America's future military leaders are learning some important lessons this week—just not the ones we should want.

]]>What to Expect When You’re Expecting Chinese Marineshttp://freebeacon.com/national-security/expect-youre-expecting-chinese-marines/
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/expect-youre-expecting-chinese-marines/#respondFri, 24 Mar 2017 08:56:30 +0000http://freebeacon.com/?p=745513Recent press reports that have received little attention in the West indicate that China is quintupling the size of its marine corps, from roughly 20,000 to 100,000 troops.

]]>Recent press reports that have received little attention in the West indicate that China is quintupling the size of its marine corps, from roughly 20,000 to 100,000 troops.

We really should be paying more attention.

Why does a development like this matter? After all, at least some of the growth will come from moving regular People's Liberation Army units out of the army and under the banner of the marines—moving troops from one administrative basket into another, really. But the fact is, any country needs an army to defend itself, and a large country in a complex region probably needs a large and capable army to pull this off. You only need a large marine corps if you intend to assert yourself overseas.

Just consider the example of the United States. For most of its first century-plus of existence, the U.S. Marine Corps, famously founded in a Philadelphia tavern in 1775, was a highly limited force in both size and capability. With few exceptions, it performed modest tasks in support of the Navy, like port security, limited ship-to-shore expeditions, and putting down the occasional mutiny. This all changed following the Spanish American War, when the United States adopted a much more assertive posture regionally and internationally. Contingents of Marines, already used to operating in relatively small formations and in concert with the Navy, pursued American interests throughout Central America and the Caribbean during the Banana Wars—and in China during the Boxer Rebellion.

At the outset of America's entry into World War One, the Marines' expeditionary experience allowed them rapidly to throw together a brigade to join the allies in Europe. (Hence the slogan, "First to Fight.") In the interwar period, the Corps went all in on the theory that naval infantry were key to securing overseas bases for a global power, and that amphibious landings would be key to such operations. Such planning led to the Marines' leading role in the Pacific in World War Two.

The rise of the U.S. Marine Corps is inseparable from the rise of America as a global power. Put another way, if you have no intention of being a global power, you have no need of a marine corps.

China's marine corps was first established in 1953 and grew rapidly, having been created with a fight for Taiwan in mind. The immediacy of this goal faded for a spell, and the fortunes of the marines faded with it. Re-established in the 1970s, the PLA Marine Corps became a small, specialized force not unlike the early American Marines in some respects—an organization tied to the PLA Navy, with certain commando-like capabilities.

In recent years, in the context of a broader effort to modernize and restructure the Chinese military, the marines' star has risen. A perceptive piece last year in The National Interest surveyed this development, asking if China can "copy the U.S. Marine Corps?" and pointing out how the patterns of major training exercises indicate that the organization was mimicking the flexibility of the U.S. Marines, who have long noted modestly in their hymn that they have fought in "every clime and place." The article asked readers to consider "the potential ramifications of such a Chinese amphibious force maintaining a constant presence in, say, Southeast Asia," or indeed that it "may routinely operate in the Indian Ocean as well—and, for that matter, even in the Mediterranean."

With such an increase in size that we now expect, such expectations are entirely reasonable. Considered along with Beijing's "One Belt, One Road" initiative and its newly aggressive basing strategy, with naval facilities operating and/or under construction in Pakistan and Djibouti, it also seems that merely regional goals are not the extent of China's ambitions. Not that those goals aren't important—indeed, a marine corps that is 100,000 strong, properly supported by airlift and amphibious capabilities (which are also enjoying a surge of investment as part of the PLA's modernization efforts) poses a real threat to Taiwan. Even if a full scale, conventional assault seems reckless and unnecessary, given the other tools that Beijing has at its disposal, the mere credible threat of such an invasion is a powerful political tool in its own right.

Far from a peaceful rise as a nation comfortable with existing international norms and reasonably concerned with its own security, China gives every indication of a desire to call the shots globally. If it achieves such a position, the world will come to miss American predominance—and so will Americans.

]]>http://freebeacon.com/national-security/expect-youre-expecting-chinese-marines/feed/0Korea on the Brinkhttp://freebeacon.com/national-security/korea-on-the-brink/
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/korea-on-the-brink/#respondFri, 17 Mar 2017 08:56:24 +0000http://freebeacon.com/?p=741766The speed of now-former South Korean President Park Geun-hye's spectacular fall from power took many foreign observers by surprise. After all, the initial reports last autumn that were to snowball into a generational political crisis seemed pretty bland. The daughter of the president's family friend and "spiritual adviser" Choi Soon-sil had apparently been accepted into a prestigious women's university as a result of political pressure. An "equestrian scholarship" had been invented as a pretext for getting her in despite comparatively weak grades. Students at the school—not fans of the conservative president, unsurprisingly—were protesting.

]]>The speed of now-former South Korean President Park Geun-hye's spectacular fall from power took many foreign observers by surprise. After all, the initial reports last autumn that were to snowball into a generational political crisis seemed pretty bland. The daughter of the president's family friend and "spiritual adviser" Choi Soon-sil had apparently been accepted into a prestigious women's university as a result of political pressure. An "equestrian scholarship" had been invented as a pretext for getting her in despite comparatively weak grades. Students at the school—not fans of the conservative president, unsurprisingly—were protesting.

The situation was not ideal as a matter of clean government and university administration, to be sure—but also not too far off from the kind of garden variety moral compromise that can be detected at most elite institutions of higher learning, in any country. But man-oh-man, did the story not stop there. Soon there were allegations that Choi, the spiritual adviser (to critics, more of a "cult leader" or "Rasputin") had been shaking down business executives and profiting off of her access to the president in impressively diverse and creative ways. Verifying her level of influence on President Park, a tablet computer containing Choi's mark-ups of the president's speeches was turned up by Korean reporters. Choi Soon-sil-gate had legs.

Park's defenders took an "if-only-the-Czar-knew" approach to the president's defense. (They still do.) Vast crowds in Seoul regularly took to the streets. Park's poll numbers plunged into the single digits. In December, she was impeached; last Friday the courts upheld the impeachment, and she was officially removed from office. Prosecutors have summoned her for questioning next week. A special presidential election is now scheduled for May 9.

Park was not a popular president even before the current crisis. Elected in 2012, she had been damaged by a series of scandals, including one that broke in 2013 and involved the country's intelligence service having generated over a million tweets to aid Park in the 2012 elections. The following year the horrifying sinking of the Sewol ferry killed 304 passengers, most of whom were high school students. Park was widely perceived to have handled the disaster poorly, in a political moment with striking parallels to Katrina and President George W. Bush.

But the real foundations of the Choi scandal's surprising potency lay much, much deeper in history. President Park's father, Park Chung-hee, had seized control of South Korea in a military coup in 1961, and ruled until his assassination in 1979. Choi Soon-sil's father, Choi Tae-min, had played a similar role of spiritual confidant and powerful influence for the elder Park, and had been crucial in his daughter's upbringing, especially considering that not only her father but also her mother had been assassinated (the latter in 1974.)

For the South Korean left—and, as the scandal grew, the country's political center as well—the disclosures of collusion and self-dealing involving a second-generation Park-Choi axis were akin to poking on an exposed nerve.

Conservatives prefer to remember the elder Park's regime as a time of wealth and relative stability, during which the government sponsored a designated group of conglomerates called "chaebols"—think Samsung, Hyundai, and LG—whose explosive growth and eventual global prominence dragged the nation out of poverty and earned it a role in last century's "Asian miracle." For the left, however, the period is remembered for its military dictatorship and the oligarchic influence of the families that controlled the conglomerates, feathering their nests without needing to be bothered by anything resembling democratic accountability. Recent revelations stemming from the Choi scandal that involved President Park's role in a merger and management succession controversy at Samsung further accentuated the sense that the secretive relationships between her family and the chaebols were alive, well, and determinative of her policies.

Park's ouster may well be a blow for good government—and it is certainly a credit to South Korea's still young democracy that the impeachment has proceeded without a rupture in the nation's constitutional order. Unfortunately from the American perspective, that's it for good news. The next president, whoever it will be, is virtually certain to be less friendly to the United States and more dovish towards North Korea. The happy moment of a coalition of pro-American governments in Northeast Asia (Abe in Japan, Park in Korea, and Tsai in Taiwan) was brief, and it is over.

The candidate currently leading in the South Korean polls, Moon Jae-in, comes from the liberal opposition and is outspoken in his skepticism of the United States and his support of something like the Sunshine Policy towards Pyongyang, which his party pursued from 1998 to 2008. In second place is Ahn Hee-jung, who has a reputation for being more pragmatic and centrist than Moon. He is currently behind Moon by 15 points in polls, and has to run against him for his party's nomination. President Park's party has yet to produce a frontrunner for its nominating process, and, to be frank, may as well not bother.

America's long-planned and controversial deployment of a sophisticated air defense system to South Korea called "THAAD" began (somewhat by surprise) last week, on what appears to be a timeline accelerated in part by Korean politics and the likely accession to the presidency of the Korean left. The deployment will be complete by summer, and substantially in place even by the time a new president takes office this spring. Like entitlements or government agencies, such deployments are much easier to stop before they begin than they are to roll back once in place. Little else in the years to come is likely to be easy.

]]>http://freebeacon.com/national-security/korea-on-the-brink/feed/0China’s Dangerous Long Game in Taiwanhttp://freebeacon.com/blog/chinas-dangerous-long-game-taiwan/
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 13:17:22 +0000http://freebeacon.com/?post_type=blog&p=739393Just over twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton responded to Chinese missile tests and amphibious exercises designed to intimidate Taiwan by dispatching two U.S. aircraft carriers to the vicinity of the island, which lies about 100 miles off the coast of the Communist mainland. Times change. In January of this year, China sailed an aircraft carrier—purchased from Russia and commissioned in 2012—leisurely around Taiwan.

]]>Just over twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton responded to Chinese missile tests and amphibious exercises designed to intimidate Taiwan by dispatching two U.S. aircraft carriers to the vicinity of the island, which lies about 100 miles off the coast of the Communist mainland. In January of this year, China sailed an aircraft carrier—purchased years ago from Russia and commissioned in 2012—leisurely around Taiwan. Times change.

The instigating deed in 1995 that provoked China’s military demonstrations and the strong American response was a trip by the then-president of Taiwan to speak at an alumni weekend at Cornell. China disapproves of visits by Taiwanese leaders to the United States, even though such trips have been heavily restricted since Washington switched its diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. The sailing of the Liaoning through the Taiwan Straits this winter occurred following the inauguration of the independence-friendly President Tsai Ing-wen in May and a precedent-rocking December phone call between Tsai and President-elect Donald Trump.

The adage that politics stop at the water’s edge is semi-fictional in America; in the context of China and Taiwan it is meaningless. For Beijing, foreign policy is conditioned by the imperative of the Communist Party to maintain its grip on domestic power. Taiwan’s thriving commercial republic—conceived originally as the exiled government of the mainland, even if such a view is less and less popular among Taiwanese voters—is treated as a dangerous challenge to the Party’s legitimacy. For Taipei’s part, "the mainland" looms over all other political concerns, and is the most important issue that splits the conservative KMT, the island’s founding party, which still holds out the possibility of eventual reunification with China, and the liberal DPP, which arose in the democracy movements of the 1980s and flirts with independence.

Beijing much prefers the KMT to be in power, and has worked doggedly to undermine the new DPP government, which last year took control of the legislature in addition to the presidency. Pressure is exerted economically, with dramatic new restrictions on tourism from the mainland that have led to demonstrations in the streets of Taipei; diplomatically, through Chinese efforts to isolate the island’s government and ensure that its representatives are unwelcome at international confabs like those of the World Heath Assembly and the International Civil Aviation Organization; and militarily, through threatening maneuvers like that of the Liaoning—not to mention constant cyberattacks, political infiltration, and information operations conducted in part through Taiwanese media concerns controlled at a remove by Beijing.

The ultimate guarantor of Taiwan’s de facto independence is the United States—and what fickle friends we are. Far from being treaty allies, we do not even maintain formal diplomatic relations with Taipei, conducting our diplomacy there from behind the veil of the American Institute in Taiwan, an embassy in all but name. (American diplomats once had to resign temporarily from the Foreign Service to be assigned there, though the practice is no longer observed.) Taiwan’s best American friends have been in the Congress, which in 1979 passed a law that requires us to provide arms for island’s self-defense. But our adherence to the law is often reluctant. Intelligence and military leaders frequently argue that our best technology ought to be held back because the Taiwanese military is thoroughly penetrated by Beijing’s intelligence apparatus. Moreover, even standard arms packages are sometimes held up entirely, typically in an effort to assuage Beijing. My colleague Bill Gertz reports this morning that exactly this happened in December, when the Obama National Security Council blocked a package that had been approved by both the State and Defense departments.

The Free Beacon’s sources expect the Trump administration to reverse this decision, and likely to improve the quality of the arms package, sometime after the president’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping early next month. Considering Beijing’s belligerent behavior in the East and South China Seas and its ongoing efforts to lay the foundations for regional hegemony, an enhanced arms deal would be a welcome aid to deterrence. Loosening restrictions on the travel of Taiwanese government officials to America and of American military personnel to Taiwan would also improve relations. Additionally, following the death of TPP, Taipei is lobbying hard for a bilateral trade deal with the United States. Along with arrangements with Japan and the post-Brexit UK, such a deal is worth considering.

All that said, American strategic planning needs to keep firmly in view the sophistication and long-term nature of China’s designs. Taiwan is a kind of belt-buckle in the so-called "first island chain" that Beijing would like to set as the outer boundary of its regional waters, eventually transforming the chain’s political units—like Japan to Taiwan’s north, and the Philippines to its south—into tributary states. Taiwan is the closest island to China, and the most vulnerable, but the likelihood of a conventional military assault by the People’s Liberation Army, with all the trappings of Normandy or Inchon, is very low in the nuclear age.

More likely is that Beijing will bide its time, waiting for American commitment in the region to diminish and for U.S. allies to grow more sympathetic to China. It will build its military capacity in the South and East China Seas, and improve its ability to deny access there to American forces through the threat or use of advanced weapons. Taking a page from Putin in the Ukraine, it will continue its efforts to manipulate Taiwan’s politics. Then, ten or twenty years from now, some precipitating incident in Taiwan will generate a political crisis. For the security of the region, etc., a Chinese blockade of the island will be declared. Taiwan, dependent on imports, does not require a D-Day to be subdued.

China’s Communist regime pursues hegemony in part because its domestic legitimacy has rested in recent decades on unsustainable economic growth. As the growth flattens out, nationalism and imperialist zeal offer themselves as ready replacements. American planning ought to grapple with the long-term dimensions of China’s actions, and on the domestic vulnerability they suggest.

]]>Mighty Mousehttp://freebeacon.com/culture/mighty-mouse/
http://freebeacon.com/culture/mighty-mouse/#respondFri, 03 Mar 2017 09:56:57 +0000http://freebeacon.com/?p=734479There are three stories by which an American familiar with the career of Winston Churchill, Britain's savior, could become quickly apprised of that of Clement Attlee, its transformer. The first occurs in Stepney, East London, in January 1911.

]]>There are three stories by which an American familiar with the career of Winston Churchill, Britain's savior, could become familiar quickly with that of Clement Attlee, its transformer. The first occurs in Stepney, East London, in January 1911. The remnant of a band of Latvian robbers is besieged by the authorities at 100 Sidney Street. The police are outmatched, the army is called in, and Churchill is on the scene. Attlee, a 28-year-old social worker and activist who had adopted the working class neighborhood as his own, is an onlooker in the crowd. This is the first time he lays eyes on the young Churchill, who is playing perfectly to type by sending in troops to impose order amidst the slums.

The second story is likely apocryphal, sadly, and is traced by John Bew, Attlee's latest biographer, to Dean Acheson. It is 1944 in the Cabinet War Rooms. Churchill and Attlee, now the ranking Labour minister in Churchill's coalition war government, enter the men's room at the same time. In Bew's telling:

Lest there be any awkwardness, Churchill went to the far end of the urinal, leaving Attlee plenty of space in the middle. "Isn't this unusual modesty for you, Winston?" quipped Attlee." "Not at all," replied Churchill, "I'm just suspicious of you socialists."

The third story is very much true. The following year, after Churchill's stunning defeat in the general election, he walks onto the floor of Parliament and is greeted by Conservative members singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." Labour backbenchers respond immediately with a round of "The Red Flag," the party's semi-official and, to moderates, somewhat awkward anthem. It begins:

The People's Flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its every fold.

Then raise the scarlet standard high.
Beneath its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.

An independent member wrote at the time that the song was "very bad tactics, doing no good and calculated to frighten all the retired Colonels in Cheltenham and Leamington Spa." Among those who appeared to react with embarrassment, according to Bew, was the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, who "was not so comfortable with a display of such naked tribalism under the scrutiny of the public eye."

Such concern with appearances was to be expected from a man who had spent the previous five years prosecuting a "country first, party second" strategy as Labour's leader, maintaining the coalition with Churchill until forced by his party's membership to break it up before the final end of hostilities—a move Attlee opposed as premature. It would not have been as easy to predict if one knew only the younger Attlee, who was at ease in the complex world of British socialism, maintaining good relations with radical intellectuals and trade unionists alike. Bew, who has produced a fascinating book about this mild-mannered, self-effacing, and moderate man (often good qualities, but rough on a biographer) succeeds in part because he uses his subject as an opportunity to delve into the intellectual background of the British labor movement as a whole.

John Ruskin, H.G. Wells, William Morris, Jack London (whose People of the Abyss dealt with the slums of London), Robert Tressell, Patrick MacGill, Edward Bellamy, and more besides are accounted for here. The same applies to organizations within the fractious institutional landscape of the British left at the turn of the century: the ILP and SDF, the Socialist League, the Fabian Society, the various trade unions, charitable establishments like Toynbee Hall, and publications like Commonwealth Magazine.

At the time Attlee began his career in Stepney, the notion that the Labour Party, founded in 1900, would one day lead the country would have seemed astonishing. It may also have seemed astonishing, at least from a distance, that the suburban and upper middle class Attlee—a product of Haileybury ("more Etonian than Eton itself, though a bit cheaper") and Oxford—should be accepted so completely by East London's working class. But as a sort of youth counselor drawn to the slum because his school had founded a modest society for good works there, Attlee's honesty and lack of condescension impressed the locals, as did his commitment—enough that no one minded his continental vacations (he fell in love with his wife Violet on a trip to Italy.)

The balance between proletarians and left-wing activists and intellectuals from wealthier backgrounds was to be an important part of the labor movement's story: of the Labour members of Parliament who mocked the Tories with their rendition of the Red Flag in 1945, only 38 percent came from a working class background. It was also to be an enormous problem, as the best and brightest planners, with the most noble intentions, often ignored the modest and non-ideological desires of the actual British working man during the Attlee government, a dynamic expertly chronicled by David Kynaston.

Of Stepney's "Clem" himself, Bew is generally admiring. Following distinguished service in the war, Major Attlee returned to London, became a borough mayor, then a member of Parliament, and then began a gradual rise through the ranks, admired more for his efficiency than his brilliance. (Bew is not above the occasional arch remark to this effect, noting of Attlee's appointment to the London School of Economics that he was "not an obvious candidate to explore the full intellectual parameters of socialism"; elsewhere he writes disconcertingly that "Attlee never much understood economics.") The source of much heartache for his party's radicals, he became much concerned with making Labour respectable. This was not merely a tactical position, but also because, despite his investment in socialist policies and early flirtations with more extreme measures, Attlee was reliably liberal in many respects, opposed to totalitarianism and a believer in democracy, constitutionalism, and the monarchy. As his power increased, it became clear that his foreign views were fundamentally Western-oriented; suspicious of Stalin, he was an admirer of FDR and of America more generally. He enjoyed reading Kipling to the end.

Anathema as all this was to the hard left, it took such a man to put Labour in a position where it could do some real work—or some real damage. This is the core of Bew's argument: that Attlee has been "underappreciated" by his critics, mostly and ironically on the left, as a kind of bystander, when in fact his strategic decisions as leader and a quiet, steely commitment to a few core principles were essential to the left's progress. National Insurance, the NHS, the nationalization of key industries, and radical new public housing policies were all instituted under his watch, and the British Empire, strapped for cash and held together largely by the force of Winston Churchill's will, was closed down on an accelerated timeline. Bew points out quite reasonably that, Attlee's ideological opposition to empire notwithstanding, it is unclear how Britain's expensive possessions could have been maintained by any leader. That said, he goes awfully easily on Attlee throughout the assessment of his government's policies. To select only one example: the partition of India in 1947, in which something like a half-million people died, is described as having left an "ugly legacy" and accorded about a paragraph of discussion. If I were responsible for such a tragedy, even only in part, I suppose I might be grateful to have about that much space devoted to it.

Attlee the man is easy to like; his legacy is more complicated, to say the very least. But Bew's main point is that a man variously described by critics as a "little mouse," a "poor little rabbit," and a "sheep in sheep's clothing," was not only a highly proximate onlooker for one of the most radical transformations of a western democracy, but essential to the whole affair. And radical it all was—to suggest otherwise is ridiculous. Consider the centuries of privilege and practice upended in the course of this quiet little anecdote from the summer of '45, courtesy of Kynaston's Austerity Britain:

"My man," called out a blazered, straw-hatted 14-year-old public schoolboy, John Rae, as he stood on Bishop's Stortford station with his trunk that late July.

"No," came the porter's quiet but firm reply. "That sort of thing is all over now."

]]>http://freebeacon.com/culture/mighty-mouse/feed/0Our New Afghanistan Strategy Must Get Tough on Pakistanhttp://freebeacon.com/blog/new-afghanistan-strategy-must-get-tough-pakistan/
Tue, 28 Feb 2017 19:59:37 +0000http://freebeacon.com/?post_type=blog&p=732598Yesterday the Pentagon presented its recommendations to the White House for how to defeat ISIS. It is likely that the military campaign that will follow President Trump's final decision will look a good deal like President Obama's, albeit with looser restrictions, and possibly a dimmer view towards Iranian influence in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council are all hard at work formulating a new approach in Afghanistan. They must resist the temptation to recommend a "more-of-the-same-but-with-a-freer-hand" approach to the president.

]]>Yesterday the Pentagon presented its recommendations to the White House for how to defeat ISIS. It is likely that the military campaign that will follow President Trump's final decision will look a good deal like President Obama's, albeit with looser restrictions, and possibly a dimmer view towards Iranian influence in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council are all hard at work formulating a new approach in Afghanistan. They must resist the temptation to recommend an "accelerated" but largely similar approach to the president.

What the last administration was doing to fight ISIS was moving too slowly, but at least it was moving in the right direction. ISIS is already on the road to defeat. In Afghanistan, however, the best you can say is that we are in a stalemate with various insurgent groups, most prominently the Taliban.

Afghanistan has always been a more challenging problem than Iraq, even if the policy community has failed to appreciate this for years at a time. The problem is not due to stupid clichés to the effect that Afghanistan is the "graveyard of empires"—the country has spent much of its history being ruled by external powers. It has more to do with its weak tradition of central government and the fact that its Pakistani neighbors are heavily invested in preventing the rise of a strong Afghanistan with an independent foreign policy. As I wrote recently, Pakistan's interference is driven by fears that Afghanistan could align with India, thereby posing an existential risk to South Asia's Islamic Republic.

Any continuation of an American commitment in Afghanistan must reformulate our strategy with this regional calculus in mind. Of particular interest for this policy debate is a report prepared by Christopher Kolenda of the Center for a New American Security. Aside from highlighting the stunning fact that the U.S. has spent more money in Afghanistan than it did on the Marshall Plan, in real dollars, and that we continue to award Pakistan $742.2 million each year—in effect arming our adversary—the report contains a number of thought-provoking recommendations.

Kolenda rightly argues that it is time to get tougher on Pakistan, with measures that include "suspending major non-NATO ally status, designation as a state impeding counter-terrorism efforts, suspension of security assistance, targeted actions against specific individuals and organizations for supporting militant groups, discouraging future IMF bailouts, and designation as a state sponsor of terrorism." Kolenda also proposes further cultivating a U.S. partnership with India.

Such steps are welcome. But Kolenda proposes a tough line on Pakistan in part to bring Islamabad to the table for a grand bargain on Afghan neutrality. Kabul, backed by the international community, would declare itself neutral on questions of regional alignment, in return for pledges of non-interference from its neighbors.

This is, at best, far-fetched. Any strategy that relies on the Pakistanis (not to mention the Iranians) to pledge anything in good faith is unlikely to succeed.

India and Pakistan, with China watching from the sidelines, are engaged in a dangerous standoff in which the stakes, considering the two countries' nuclear arsenals, are survival. Rather than try to bring about a fragile balance that takes Afghanistan out of this equation, we should accept that Afghanistan will always be a factor in Indian and Pakistani decision making, and use that fact to achieve our own purposes in the region.

What are those purposes? Aside from a general preference for order over state collapse (which, when it happened in Iraq and Syria, led to the rise of ISIS) the United States is in Afghanistan in order to prevent it from becoming a Taliban-controlled space from which another 9/11 could be launched. But after sixteen years of war, this justification grows ever weaker. There are plenty of places from which organizations like al-Qaeda and ISIS dream of harming the west—Syria, Yemen, and Libya top the list—and we do not occupy them with thousands of American troops. Sometimes a lean counter-terror strategy makes sense.

If we choose to continue to fight the re-establishment of a Taliban state in Kabul, we need to get smart, and we need to figure out how such an effort fits into a broader, regionally integrated strategy. We must reduce our focus on building the Afghan state and on helping it control terrain outside of major population centers. The Afghan state, with sufficient international assistance to forestall its collapse, will have to build itself over time. Rather, we should expand the battlespace to apply pressure on the Taliban in places it does not expect and where it cannot resist—specifically, on its sources of support.

Such a battlespace expansion therefore ought to include diplomatic measures targeting Pakistan. In addition to Kolenda's recommendations, we should explicitly link our support for India to our effort to fight the Taliban. If a pro-India Afghanistan is what Pakistan fears, then let's give it to them. India has long had a low-profile assistance footprint in Afghanistan. Why not encourage and facilitate the enlargement of that footprint?

In addition, perhaps the U.S. pose of neutrality on the dispute over Kashmir needs a review. Pakistan also has a whole host of internal security problems, including a long-standing and low-simmering ethnic insurgency in its Baloch region. Why are we so concerned with helping Pakistan with this problem, however indirectly, through our security assistance funds? Last time I checked, we have the power to make such problems worse. (Meanwhile, our direct military assistance to Afghanistan must have a small enough footprint that it does not require access to Pakistani ports for its sustainment.)

The existence of a Pakistani nuclear arsenal makes some nervous about applying too much pressure on Islamabad. While we must plan for catastrophic scenarios like a Pakistani state collapse, the fear of such an event is a trump card that Pakistan cynically plays to forestall international pressure before it is applied. Moreover, Pakistan has long been building a relationship with China to hedge against a possible break with America. Fine. Let Beijing pay Islamabad's bills—and let's see how much both sides prefer that arrangement.

Our attention should not be oriented on the terrain controlled by the Taliban, or on the quixotic project of turning Afghanistan into a western state, but on the true sources of support for the insurgency within the Pakistani state. We must be prepared to inflict pain on those sources in creative and unconventional ways. Afghanistan will only be secure when such men decide the pain isn't worth it anymore, or if they conclude that their support for the insurgency is having the unexpected effect of weakening their regional position. If the culpable elements of the Pakistani state then cease to provide succor and refuge for Afghan insurgents, a negotiated solution will become possible—and not before.

A tougher line on Pakistan could fit well into a long-term, integrated U.S. strategy for the Indo-Pacific region. In light of communist China's regional and global ambitions, New Delhi's democratic government is a natural ally for the United States. Further alignment would make sense even if we weren't already dealing with an insurgency in Afghanistan. If Pakistan insists on forcing a closer U.S. alignment with India at its own expense—so be it.

]]>Count Tessin Went to Paris and All Sweden Got Was This Lousy Museumhttp://freebeacon.com/culture/count-tessin-went-paris-sweden-got-lousy-museum/
http://freebeacon.com/culture/count-tessin-went-paris-sweden-got-lousy-museum/#respondFri, 24 Feb 2017 09:56:53 +0000http://freebeacon.com/?p=730492As someone who once went out after dinner as a graduate student and spent my last remaining dollars on a used book, figuring that I could squeeze an advance on my next stipend disbursement out of the college dean the next morning, I get what Count Carl Gustaf Tessin was about. Tessin was a Swedish politician, man of letters, memoirist, and art lover who, following the success of his party in 1738, accepted an appointment as an ambassador to the court of Louis XV. Once in Paris, he embarked on a glorious binge of collection, commissioning, and buying vast numbers of paintings and prints.

]]>As someone who once went out after dinner as a graduate student and spent my last remaining dollars on a used book, figuring that I could squeeze an advance on my next stipend disbursement out of the college dean the next morning, I get what Count Carl Gustaf Tessin was about. Tessin was a Swedish politician, man of letters, memoirist, and art lover who, following the success of his party in 1738, accepted an appointment as an ambassador to the court of Louis XV. Once in Paris, he embarked on a glorious binge of collection, commissioning, and buying vast numbers of paintings and prints.

Upon returning home a few years later, he was bankrupt, but the college deans of his story—King Frederick I and Crown Prince Adolf Frederick—swooped in for the save, buying up most of Tessin's collection and keeping his family off the streets. Today, the works form the core of the Stockholm Nationalmuseum's holdings. This is the sort of commitment that marks a true collector. Anything less is amateur hour. (If some small new country like South Sudan needs books to form the basis of its own national library, I am available to talk.)

‘The Triumph of Venus' by François Boucher

The Nationalmuseum is closed for renovations this year, and the heart of Tessin's contribution is currently on tour at the Morgan in New York. Now, I yield to no one in my admiration for Tessin's recklessness in the assembly of this collection. His taste, however, is another matter.

The one thing that can be said in his defense is that we are all creatures of our epoch, and his did him no favors. The high French Rococo style of most of the paintings in the exhibition is, for lack of a better word, gross. It is also cloying, twee, nostalgic, gauzy, self-conscious, kiss-ass, artificial, decorative, frothy, and sentimental. If Nicholas Sparks were a period of art history, he would be the Rococo. If the Rococo's furniture and knick-knacks were on offer at a Baghdad yard sale in the 80's, browsing members of the Ba'ath party elite would turn up their mustachioed noses at the schmaltz displayed before them. The careers of Boucher and Fragonard were on their own sufficient justification for the French Revolution. Inequality and political repression just rounded out the case.

‘The Dachshund Pehr with Dead Game and Rifle' by Jean-Baptiste Oudry

Take this, then, as my collective commentary on the portion of this exhibition devoted to paintings, including (and especially) the jewel in Tessin's crown, Boucher's ‘Triumph of Venus.' Even the works on hand of Chardin, whose occasional restraint might otherwise earn him a pass, have such limited emotional depth that they make the illustrations on a Hallmark card look like Michelangelo's ‘Last Judgment.' Practically the only painting that succeeds does so because its aim is so modest: the portrait of Tessin's dog that was commissioned from Jean-Baptiste Oudry. That is one good-looking, albeit chesty, dachshund.

Far, far superior are the old master drawings Tessin collected in Paris. He obtained the bulk of those on exhibition at a fire sale of works owned by a banker named Pierre Crozat. (Buying at a discount is not an admirable trait in dedicated collectors, who ought to avoid any hint of prudence. Tessin, being Tessin, managed to escape doubts about his seriousness by taking one look at the auction's bargain prices and walking away with 2,057 drawings.) Represented here are Dürer, Raphael, Ghirlandaio, Poussin, Rembrandt, van Dyck, and more. The gallery is a marvelous, miniature history of art from the high classicism of the Renaissance to the Baroque.

‘Robin the Dwarf' by Anthony van Dyck

For those used to seeing the work of the greats only on large canvases or through photographs of frescos, it will be remarkable to see the range of expression and emotional force they could achieve with the use of only ink and paper. The drawings range from what appear to be quick sketches to more fully developed works. But even when the subject matter is unremarkable and the investment of the artist's time relatively brief—a few modest homes in Rembrandt's ‘Three Thatched Cottages by a Road,' or a quick study by the same artist of a seated woman, ‘Study for the Figure of Esther in The Great Jewish Bride'—the impression of reality, conveyed with line and little else, is striking.

In other words, if you can get to the Morgan, go for the drawings, and stay for the drawings.

]]>http://freebeacon.com/culture/count-tessin-went-paris-sweden-got-lousy-museum/feed/0There Is No Solution in Afghanistanhttp://freebeacon.com/national-security/no-solution-afghanistan/
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/no-solution-afghanistan/#respondFri, 17 Feb 2017 09:59:15 +0000http://freebeacon.com/?p=727021The American predicament in Afghanistan is at once ridiculous and tragic. More than 8,000 American troops remain in the country, prosecuting the longest war in our nation's history. Overlapping networks of insurgent groups—most prominently the Taliban—had a good year in 2016, seizing terrain and conducting terror strikes to destabilize the U.S.-backed Kabul government. The American commander in the country wants a "few thousand" more troops. Despite the supporting role that the U.S. contingent is meant to play, casualties are still being sustained, sometimes in places with depressingly familiar names—as in Sangin, seized from the Taliban a few years ago at the expense of gallons of British and U.S. Marine blood. Two Americans were wounded there last week.

]]>The American predicament in Afghanistan is at once ridiculous and tragic. More than 8,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, prosecuting the longest war in our nation's history. Overlapping networks of insurgent groups—most prominently the Taliban—had a good year in 2016, seizing terrain and conducting terror strikes to destabilize the U.S.-backed Kabul government. The American commander in the country wants a "few thousand" more troops. Despite the supporting role that the U.S. contingent is meant to play, casualties are still being sustained, sometimes in places with depressingly familiar names—as in Sangin, seized from the Taliban a few years ago at the expense of gallons of British and U.S. Marine blood. Two Americans were wounded there last week.

The Taliban's efforts in Sangin appear to be part of a larger campaign to seize the entirety of opium-rich Helmand Province, including its capital Lashkar Gah, a small city that was untouchable during the period of peak U.S. operations but which now is battling the insurgency on its very streets. According to a U.S. government watchdog, eight out of 14 districts in Helmand are under insurgent "control or influence." One of these is Marjah district, where seven years ago today I was fighting alongside a few thousand other U.S. Marines on behalf of the Afghan government. We were told we were bringing a "government-in-a-box," and by 2011 there were manifest gains in the district's security, about which the Marines who fought there can be proud.

And yet when Stars and Stripes ran a story about the area last year, the headline was "A look at how the US-led coalition lost Afghanistan's Marjah district to the Taliban." How powerfully depressing, and what a failure of American strategy and leadership.

Many books have been or will be written about how things went so wrong. But what should America should do next? Speaking in basic terms, we have three options for our continuing deployment in Afghanistan: end it, extend it (which, despite the four-figure adjustment, is essentially what the current commander is requesting), or ramp it up again.

These are all poor options. We are in Afghanistan to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Taliban and thereby becoming a platform, yet again, for Islamist terror that threatens America. If we pull out and restrict ourselves to poking away with drones and special operations raids, we will see a Taliban government in Kabul and widespread regional disorder. If we extend our current force level and strategy, the current unhappy stalemate will continue. If we ramp up our military commitment, what can we possibly hope to achieve if the Kabul government is unable to sustain what our troops gain? Anyway, there is little political will for a significant escalation, and zero support for a long-term, violent occupation at 2011 surge-levels.

We seem to have rolled the geopolitical version of snake eyes. History does not offer the possibility of mulligans, and fresh starts are hard to come by, but the new administration can try to rethink the problem. What will be critical in any such effort is to keep in mind something too often forgotten in our debates about Afghanistan: that it is a relatively minor player in a regional drama, the main actors in which are Pakistan and India. If we zoom out to consider the broader regional issues, the exercise may clarify our interests and strategy in Afghanistan.

It is well documented (and common knowledge on the ground) that the Pakistani state's varying degrees of passive and active support make the Afghan insurgency possible. In an acknowledgement of this fact, it became trendy during the Obama administration to refer to "AfPak" issues—but this manifestly had little positive effect for the results of our policies. In any event, the phrase doesn't go far enough, because Pakistan conducts no foreign policy without thinking of India, with which it has fought a series of wars, and which it understands (accurately) to be an existential threat.

This consideration very much affects Pakistan's Afghan policy. The Taliban was for a long time a tool of Pakistan designed to maintain influence and "strategic depth" to its west. India has friends in Afghanistan, hearkening back to the days of the Cold War when Pakistan, the United States, and Pashtun Islamist insurgents formed one axis, facing off against a Soviet-backed Afghan government formed by northern ethnic elites and more "establishment" Pashtuns. India, as a leader of the non-aligned movement, was far more sympathetic to Russia's interests than to America's, and had an obvious interest in being friendly to an anti-Pakistan government in Kabul—so as to prevent Pakistani "strategic depth."

To the extent that Afghanistan has been able to exert much of an independent foreign policy, it spent much of the 20th century balancing between Pakistan and India. Following the American intervention in 2001, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a creature of traditionally pro-government Pashtun tribes, took a consistently dim view of Pakistan.

After briefly appearing to seek a sort of reset, Karzai's successor—Ashraf Ghani—has followed suit. Not that anyone in the West much noticed, but this past December relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan reached their lowest point in the 15 years since 9/11. In a dramatic moment at a conference devoted to Afghan reconstruction in Amritsar, India, Ghani flatlyrejected a Pakistani offer of $500 million in assistance. For a country as hard-up as Afghanistan, which is enormously dependent on foreign aid and which struggles with such basic state functions as tax collection, such a rejection is no light matter.

In the longcompetition for influence in Kabul, India currently has the upper hand. But Pakistan cannot simply retire from the field, because a stable, pro-India Afghanistan is a major threat to its security. An unstable, pro-India Afghanistan is manageable—but better yet is an unstable Afghanistan whose major state functions have been captured by a Pakistani proxy like the Taliban. This is why elements of the Pakistani state have supported Afghan insurgents in the past, and why they will support them in the future: not because they are religious crazies, or because they perversely prefer regional disorder to order—but because they believe they must follow such a policy in order to survive.

Discussing the American troop levels needed in order to help the Kabul government to battle the Afghan insurgency is, in other words, a hopelessly blinkered conversation. There are no solutions in Afghanistan. Its problems, however, are a function of powerful regional forces—and it is at that level which we must seek to identify policy goals and develop strategies to achieve them. In the years to come, America and India—both massive and wealthy democracies—will have many common interests, not least the management of a rising China that appears to be aiming at regional, if not global, hegemony. Perhaps it is time to be more serious about the fact that our interests in Afghanistan are similar, too, even if that means dropping any lingering pretense of cooperation with Pakistan.

]]>http://freebeacon.com/national-security/no-solution-afghanistan/feed/0Here There Be Dragonshttp://freebeacon.com/national-security/here-there-be-dragons/
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/here-there-be-dragons/#respondFri, 10 Feb 2017 09:58:39 +0000http://freebeacon.com/?p=723556Michael R. Auslin describes his valuable new book as a "bearish" account of the prospects for a forthcoming Asian Century. A decade ago this would also have been a contrarian analysis, but not in 2017.

]]>Michael R. Auslin describes his valuable new book as a "bearish" account of the prospects for a forthcoming Asian Century. A decade ago this would also have been a contrarian analysis, but not in 2017. As Auslin notes, "Today the zeitgeist has changed dramatically, and everyone from military planners to business leaders now accepts that the risks to Asia's future are real." Thank goodness for that, on multiple counts. However disconcerting the new forecast for the Indo-Pacific—the term Auslin prefers—we can at least celebrate the diminishment of progressive affection for Asian autocracies, which seemed to be based on the belief that at least they made the high-speed trains run on time.

Dense with useful insights, this volume is an impressive synthesis of research, interviews, and some on-the-ground reporting. At one point Auslin is rolling around Hanoi on the back of a motor scooter at high speed. At another he is crouched in a tunnel dug by North Korea to infiltrate Seoul, staring through a series of barriers into the subterranean reaches of the Hermit Kingdom. Having crouched in the same tunnel myself, I can attest that the experience is an excellent summation of the surreal nature of life in South Korea.

After the tunnel (one among several) was discovered and plugged up, its southern access point near the DMZ was opened to tourists. When I visited, the facility was crowded with high-spirited busloads of visitors. It even has a gift shop. Not many miles to the south, life in very modern, quite wealthy Seoul proceeds, and it is possible to forget for a few hours at a time (much longer for locals, I expect) that its concrete and glass would be pulverized in the opening days of any peninsular conflict by the North's artillery. Thousands of tubes are apparently oriented on the Seoul area. There is no effective countermeasure to massed artillery fire.

A regional war is obviously the most serious risk to Asia's future—and to the world's, as the consequences of such a conflict would be unlikely to remain local. Auslin's account includes a discussion of security flashpoints, but also takes readers on a tour of several other categories of risk, namely: the possibility of an acute economic slowdown; the "Goldilocks problem" in Asian demographics—some countries have too much population growth, others have too little, and China is shifting violently from the former to the latter; domestic political instability in the region's most important states; and the lack of sufficient architecture for regional community on the order of a NATO or European Union.

Few of the problems Auslin outlines are without solutions, but those solutions would require profound shifts in local attitudes—no easy task. For example, it seems obvious to American observers that cooperation among the region's democracies is an obvious first step away from the post-war "hub-and-spoke" system of Pacific security and toward a multilateral, liberal regional order. Then said observers have to confront the fact that large portions of two of the key countries required for any such cooperation—South Korea and Japan—despise each other at least as much as they do their common adversaries. By the same token, the obvious solution to an excess of humanity here, and a shortage there, would seem to be immigration. But the latent (to be kind) xenophobia and racialism in much of the region stands in the way of such an approach. (Though necessity may yet prove to be the mother of attitude adjustment: A senior Japanese official told me last year that, while significant increases in permanent immigration were not on Tokyo's near-term radar, it was much more a topic of discussion than would have been possible only a few years earlier.)

Time will tell whether Auslin's proposals for dealing with all of this have been overcome by events. (The book was written before the November election, the subsequent demise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the full manifestation of Rodrigo Duterte's populism, among other relevant developments.) In Auslin's view, the continued prosperity of Asia, or at least the prevention of catastrophe there, is critical to America's own prospects—and America should continue to lead in order to forestall disaster.

Like most right-leaning national security scholars, Auslin is underwhelmed by the Obama administration's "pivot" in practice but supportive of increased engagement in the region. He notes of his own proposals for such that "it is of little use to argue that the goal of this strategy is not to contain China." Auslin would establish two concentric "triangles" of cooperation, the outer consisting of the region's democracies (India, South Korea, Japan, and Australia) and the inner consisting of key maritime players in the region's core (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Singapore, "with participation by Thailand and outreach to Vietnam.")

Such arrangements would not be an "inflexible new alliance system" but a looser "community of interest." The outer group would hold regular summits and divide responsibilities for regional leadership among them. The inner group would have more modest goals, including joint patrols with the U.S. Navy to promote, ahem, "maritime safety."

It all sounds very reasonable, even if complicated by significant obstacles—like the seductive appeal of the Chinese economy to our allies—that will require leadership, investment, and luck to overcome. Of course, in addition to these triangles of security cooperation, Auslin also proposes increased economic liberalization and the encouragement of political liberalization, along with more trade and a loosening of caps on the immigration of high-skilled workers to the United States. I look forward to a new afterword in the paperback edition—or perhaps a long journal article before then—examining how such an approach might have to bend in the wake of this year's profound changes in American politics.